Two-Thirds of Retail’s Inventory Losses Are Empty Shelves, Not Excess Stock
Retail Insight Network published a breakdown on August 6 of what bad inventory costs the industry, and the split is not the one most operators assume. IHL Group puts global inventory distortion at roughly $1.7 trillion in 2026, equal to 6.2% of worldwide retail sales. Out-of-stocks account for 65.6% of that. Overstock, the problem retailers spend most of their planning cycles worrying about, is the other 34.4%.
What happened
The piece, written by Mohamed Dabo for GlobalData’s Retail Insight Network, sets IHL’s current estimates against the numbers retail has been citing for a decade.
The landmark figure is $1.75 trillion a year, and IHL breaks it down like this:
- $634.1 billion lost to out-of-stocks
- $471.9 billion tied up in overstocks
- $642.6 billion in preventable returns
IHL’s 2026 read lands at about $1.7 trillion, or 6.2% of global retail sales, with empty shelves alone accounting for roughly $690.9 billion of it. Returns keep growing as their own category: the National Retail Federation put 2025 US returned merchandise at $849.9 billion, 15.8% of annual retail sales.
The most useful number in the article is the smallest one. A 2025 field study across 11 grocery stores covering about 24,000 SKUs found that running inventory audits lifted overall sales by 11%. The biggest gains came from a specific failure: products the system listed as available that staff could not physically find.
Why it matters
That last finding is the one merchants can act on. The loss isn’t only stock you don’t have. A large share of it is stock your system says you have and your customer cannot get.
Retail plans around overstock because overstock is visible. It sits in a warehouse, it appears on a balance sheet, someone eventually marks it down. Out-of-stocks leave no trace. Nobody files a report when a shopper looks at something unavailable and leaves, which is how the category quietly grew into two-thirds of the bill.
Retail Insight Network attributes the losses to inaccurate stock records, weak forecasting, fragmented systems, and slow supply chains. Every one of those produces the same symptom, which is a gap between what your catalog claims and what a customer can actually buy.
What this means for Shopify merchants
You don’t have a shelf, so it’s tempting to file this under someone else’s problem. The online version is just harder to see.
Your collection page is the shelf. When it sorts by “featured” or “best selling” and a sold-out product holds one of the first slots, you have built the exact condition that field study measured: the system presents something as available for consideration, and the shopper can’t have it. They didn’t walk down an aisle to find an empty hook. They spent a click and some patience, and the products they could have bought were below the fold the whole time.
The 11% figure is worth sitting with, because those stores didn’t buy more inventory or run a promotion. They corrected the mismatch between the record and reality, and sales moved. Nothing about that logic is specific to grocery.
Inventory audits increased overall sales by 11% across 11 grocery stores and roughly 24,000 SKUs, with the largest improvements where systems showed products as available that staff couldn’t physically locate. — 2025 field study, via Retail Insight Network
The fix online is not to hide sold-out products, which costs you the URL, the rankings, and the restock traffic. It’s to reorder, so what a shopper can buy stays where attention lands and unavailable items drift down until stock returns. Pushy does that reordering on Shopify collection pages automatically and puts products back when they’re restocked.
The bottom line
Retail has spent years optimizing the third of the problem it can see. The two-thirds it can’t is made of moments where a ready customer met something they couldn’t buy. That happens on your collection pages too, and fixing it doesn’t require buying a single extra unit.